Using Evidence for Advocacy and Resistance in Early Years Services Exploring the Pen Green research approach Pen Green Books for Early Years Educators Series

Insightful and relevant, Using Evidence for Advocacy and Resistance in Early Years Services supports practitioners working in Early Years settings to develop the knowledge and skills required to carry out research into their own practice. Based on the renowned Pen Green approach, which advocates that co-constructed practitioner- and parent-led research leads to more effective practice and improved outcomes for all, contributors to this fascinating book explore a variety of research methodologies and techniques that have been used and developed over thirty years of provision at the Pen Green Centre for Children and Families.

The Pen Green Centre are leaders in the area of participatory research, and for many readers this book will be a primer in this new and developing approach. This practical text, which uses highly inclusive research methods, shows how providing opportunities for workers, researchers, parents, practitioners and children to co-construct the research gives it an authenticity and validity which would otherwise be lacking. Using Evidence for Advocacy and Resistance in Early Years Services will be of use to practitioners working in early years settings, researchers in early childhood education and policy-makers at all levels of local and national government.

Preface: A review of the Pen Green Research Paradigm Introduction 1. Supporting children’s transitions within a nursery school2. Multiple Perspectives 3. Using Attachment Theory to inform practice in an integrated centre for children and families 4. Polyvocal Ethnography: making sense of practices 5. Making Children’s Learning Visible: uncovering the curriculum in the child 6. Parent-to-Parent interviewing at Pen Green: voice, richness, depth 7. A Week in the Life of the Pen Green Centre: Mass-Observation comes to Corby 8. Localised ethnography, local advocacy and community development: touching, and being touched by, your community 9. Narrative Enquiry:the architecture of access 10. The voices of their childhoods: families and early years practitioners developing emancipatory methodologies through a Tracer Study

Eddie McKinnon is a researcher and workforce development advisor at the Pen Green Research Base, UK.